Trending topics on cable news: the newsflash package

Want to know what’s capturing the attention of the producers at the 24-hour cable news stations? There’s no equivalent of Twitter’s trending topics for the likes of CNN or BBC News, but the newsflash package for R by Bob Rudis can extract the latest trending topics from the TV news stations.

The newsflash package is still in alpha-test mode and only available on Github (and not yet on CRAN). Also, it seems that the GDELT API can be a little unreliable and sometimes fails to return results. Nonetheless, it looks to be a useful resource for exploring what the TV news networks are reporting.